"So anyway, the dude was sleeping with the grandma for months," I finished my craziest story across from a very handsome man who looked absolutely enthralled by the twists and turns.

"That is an insane story," he said with a bright laugh that lit up the entire dim restaurant. When I agreed to go on a date Saturday night, I didn't really have high hopes. Emmett was very attractive and he had a few funny jokes when we were texting on Tinder, but my luck lately had been atrocious.

Not to mention the fact that my Casey dreams had ramped up yet again after him telling me last night that he would like to get married in the same way I would. My inappropriate dreams were getting so bad that I left a glass of water on my night stand every night because I knew I'd wake up in the middle of the night with a dry throat.

"I know, right?" I said to Emmett. "I wish all of my stories were that exciting, but I mostly just cover petty crimes right now."

"That is still so interesting," he said. "I'm a first grade teacher, so I have a boat load of funny stories, just the weird things that little kids say and do on a daily basis."

My phone, sitting on the corner of the table, lit up with a text from Casey. I ignored it, despite the itch in my fingers to open the message. This was the one scenario where I needed to prioritize something else above Casey. I could answer it later.

I was mostly paying attention to Emmett tell me the cutest stories about the dumb little kids in his class, but I was also starting to wonder about what that text could say. It was a Saturday night, surely Casey should be with Rebecca. Unless they haven't resolved their argument from yesterday.

"Should we order dessert?" Emmett asked me at the end of the meal.

I really liked Emmett, but the unread text on my phone stopped me from agreeing and I hated myself for it. "I'm actually so tired. It's been a long week." When I saw his face start to look disappointed, I added, "But I'll take a rain check?"

"What did you have in mind?" he asked me.

I swallowed hard and said, "I'll cook you dinner? And then I'll burn it, narrowly save myself from burning down my building, and we'll order take out. Sometime next week?"

"I'll get to meet Tulip?"

"If she allows it."

"Sounds good," he smiled at me, seemingly pleased with my offering. I felt relieved that I would get to see Emmett again, but also kind of guilty knowing that the only reason I wasn't getting dessert was because of Casey's text. How absolutely ridiculous of me.

Once I said goodbye to Emmett with a dramatically fake yawn to emphasize how tired I was, I finally checked my phone. The text just read CALL ME.

"Josie, can you get down here right now?" he answered the phone out of breath as I stopped on the sidewalk in front of the nice restaurant. From here, I could see Emmett get in his car in the parking lot and drive away.

"Where are you? What's wrong?" I asked with a lump starting to form in my throat and I knew I was justified in answering the text. It was an emergency, I did the right thing.

"Nothing is wrong. Everything is perfect. I'm at work, can you come?" he asked again and I realized his breathy voice wasn't panic, it was excitement. This was a non-emergency and I should call Emmett, have him turn around so that we could go get drinks somewhere. I can't sabotage something that could be good for something that is completely imaginary.

"Okay, sure. Send me the address." I didn't even think twice about it. I hadn't been in high school for six years and yet, the second I saw Casey, it was like I reverted to being sixteen again. Except now, even if I had feelings for him, I couldn't do anything about it. He was engaged. If he felt something for me back then, he moved on and I clearly needed to do the same. I thought I had, but I'd been thrown back in.

The Bionet Labs building was a ten minute drive with the low traffic of nine p.m. and I texted Casey when I pulled into the parking lot. All the doors were locked, so I had to wait by the front doors to be let in. It was getting cold outside and I had to wrap my arms around myself to keep warm. The gin and tonic I had at dinner was doing a better job at keeping me warm than the skimpy dress I was wearing.

I didn't know how I was going to tell Natalie about this. She was going to be so disappointed when I told her that I turned down dessert just to be at Casey's beck and call. Reminding her that I did wait twenty minutes until the date ended before I picked up the phone, but it wouldn't make any difference to her. She was going to see right through me.

"Wow," I heard Casey as he opened the door behind me. "You are very overdressed."

I spun around to face him. He was wearing a button up shirt tucked into khakis, looking very professional compared to my slinky black cocktail dress with a dipping neckline and a tight fit around every one of my curves. I felt really sexy at dinner and I was actually loving it. I noticed Emmett catching a few glimpses of my cleavage and I couldn't help but smile every time. Now, under the florescent security lights of the Bionet lobby, I felt kind of exposed.

"I had that date," I said as we stepped into the vast, white lobby. It was void of any other employees and I could hear the tap of my heels echoing around the room. "What's going on?"

"Shit, I forgot about that. You didn't leave a date to come here, did you?" he glanced over his shoulder at me and kept walking.

"No."

Lie. Lie, lie, lie. I knew why I was lying so much, but I buried that reason deep down inside, covered it with dirt and denial so that I wouldn't have to deal with it.

"How did it go?" he asked me. At the end of the corridor, he scanned his badge and we entered a different room that was a million times hotter and more humid than the rest of the building. I watched as Casey put on a white lab coat that hung on a hook by the door, and then he handed me one as well.

Seeing Casey in full scientist mode with the lab coat and everything, I knew my perverted little monkey brain was already adding that to the Wet Dreams Jar.

"It was good. I'm making him dinner next week."

"What are you going to make him?" Casey asked me, trying to hide a laugh because he knew that I was a terrible cook.

"Chinese food that looks suspiciously like it's from Asian Wok."

He started to laugh again and then led me through another door and then we were inside the largest greenhouse I'd ever seen, full of trees and plants in every corner of the room. It was a breathtaking sight and he gave me a few moments to take it all in.

"Wow," I exhaled. "This is amazing."

"Isn't it?" Casey grinned at me. "I can show you around later, but come over here. I need to show you something."

He was walking so fast that I almost stumbled in my heels a couple of times against the concrete floors. Finally, I managed to hobble my way to a row of little saplings where Casey was practically bouncing with excitement.

"Tell me what I'm looking at, Case," I said.

"These are our first true hybrids, and you see this?" he pointed to one of the saplings where a few leaves began to grow. "It's a huge break through. They're perfect. These babies are sustainable feedstocks of plant biomass that can serve as alternatives to fossil carbon resources for materials, chemicals, and energy. Their ability to efficiently harvest light energy and carbon from the atmosphere and sequester this into metabolic precursors for lignocellulosic biopolymers and a wide range of plant specialized metabolites make them excellent biochemical production platforms and living biorefineries."

I still had no idea what was going on, but I could tell that it was Very Exciting. "That's amazing, Casey. How big are they going to get?"

"Twelve feet, probably." He eyed the baby trees again with a content sigh. "I just got so excited about their growth tonight that I had to call somebody. I couldn't enjoy it on my own."

"Is it going to save the world?" I asked him.

"Maybe if we get our patents. We've tried dozens of iterations to get to this hybrid and look at how beautiful these striations are here. It's truly a work of art," he was exhilarated, looking at those little saplings like they were the love of his life. "Everybody is going to be so pumped when they come into the lab on Monday."

"Why are you working so late on a Saturday?"

"I had a lot to get done," he said with a shrug, but his mouth turned down in a lopsided frown and I had a suspicion that it had to do with his argument with Rebecca. "I was only going to stay for a couple of hours, but then I could tell that these saplings were so special that I had to do more diagnostics, and once I finished a microscope sample, that's when I called you, because the they're the most beautiful on the cellular level. Do you want to see?"

"Of course I do."

He led me out of the greenhouse again, into another lab with a desk and a fancy looking microscope. I took a seat in one of the chairs and let Casey instruct me on how to look through the microscope to see the sample.

It was green and blobby, and that was about all I could decipher. No matter how many ways Casey explained it to me, I had no idea what was going on. I just knew that he was so excited, and I hadn't seen him that excited in so long. It was really a sight to see.

"I just had to share it with somebody," he said after I pulled my face away from the microscope to look at him. There was such a bright glimmer in his eye that it felt wrong to be looking at him. Like that shine was such an intimate thing of beauty, it was like seeing somebody naked.

This whole setting actually felt really intimate. The silent, vast halls of the lab at night, our chairs sitting so close together that our knees were brushing against each other. Just like high school, I felt the sudden urge to kiss him because it felt like that's what this moment was supposed to be for. Maybe it was in my head, but it looked like he wanted to kiss me too. I thought I caught his eyes flick down to my red lips before meeting my gaze again.

My entire body ached with the desire to close the gap, but I squeezed the arm rests of the chair to hold me still. "Why didn't you call Rebecca?" I asked him in a voice quieter than I meant it to be.

He turned away from me and said, "I don't know. I guess I just thought you'd appreciate it more."

"I'm sure she would like to share this moment with you," I told him.

He shook his head at me. "It always bores her to death when I start talking about work. You're the only person outside of the lab that lets me rant without it being annoying."

"Your excitement is contagious. I can't help it," I admitted to him and the voice in my head that sounded like Natalie was screaming at me to get out of the building. To go back home and text Emmett goodnight, and go to bed.

"So. Tell me more about this date," Casey said.

"He's a first grade teacher. A real sweetheart," I told him. "It was a good date."

"And you're making him dinner next week. At your apartment?"

I nodded. "That's the plan."

His eyes shifted away from me, looking uncomfortable. Maybe thinking about what the implications may be for cooking dinner at my apartment. I usually didn't bring a guy into my space until the fourth date, but I was making an exception for Emmett because he was hot, and it'd been so long since I've gotten any action, and I really needed a distraction from the man sitting in front of me. "Sounds fun."

I gave him a sideways look and then slowly said, "I'm not sixteen anymore either, Casey."

"I know. I know." I didn't know how to respond, so we just sat in silence for a little while until he said, "I think I've gotten so comfortable with Rebecca that I forgot how good it could feel."

"What?"

"Just... being with somebody," he muttered under his breath, but the way he glanced up at me made me think that he meant 'being with you, specifically' and my heart began to pound consistently in my chest. This wasn't happening, I tried to tell myself. I was reading into what he was saying way too much, just because I wasn't letting old feelings die.

"Well, clearly Rebecca makes you happy or you wouldn't have proposed."

"Yeah."

I could tell that there was something he wasn't saying, something right on the tip of his tongue, but I was afraid to know what it was. Afraid that it could unravel the delicate friendship we'd been rebuilding.

"I want a love that's all consuming, you know?" He finally broke the silence. "Where you can't stand to be away from each other, you laugh at the same jokes, share everything. She's always had her guard up and I never really felt like we had that. I thought getting married would change that, you know? Prove to her that I'm in this. But, I don't know, maybe that's stupid."

Again, I had no idea what to say to that. I wanted to tell him that I never could see why he would be with somebody like Rebecca. Not that she's a bad person, but so serious and stoic, it just never seemed like the kind of person he would mesh well with. She wants a grand wedding at St. Regis, Casey wants a bonfire in the forest. I couldn't say that though. I was not a reliable source of advice on this topic, but I could see in the way he was looking at me, that's what he wanted. "I can't tell you how to handle your relationship, Casey."

"Why not? You always have the best advice." He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees, as if prepared to hear some life changing advice come out of my dry mouth.

"Because it's something you need to figure out for yourself," I breathed out and then started looking down at my lap. "And besides, I'm biased, so my advice couldn't be trusted anyway."

"But if you were to give advice, what would it be? I promise, I'll take it with a grain of salt," he pressed.

I looked back up at him, trying to figure out what he wanted from me. It almost felt like he was asking me to tell him to break up with Rebecca, like that would be enough of a courage boost to actually do it. I wasn't going to do it though, because if he was going to end his relationship then he needed to be the one to make the decision, without me pushing or influencing in the slightest.

"What do you want from me, Case?"

"Tell me what you would do, if you were in my shoes."

"I've never been engaged, and I don't know your relationship as well as you do, so I don't know what I would do. If you want to leave her, then leave. But you got engaged for a reason, because you love her and you see your future with her in it. Right? So just remember what you're giving up if you're going to make that decision."

"Yeah." He was clearly unhappy with that answer. This time, I knew I wasn't imagining it. His eyes flicked down to my dress. The tight black one with a plunging sheer neckline that showed off my chest and my legs to the best of their abilities. And then he lifted his gaze to stop at my lips again and they stayed there long enough for me to realize I wasn't making it up.

I really felt like he wanted me to tell him not to go through with the wedding. He wanted to hear me say that I still wanted him, that we could have a chance if he wasn't with her. Or maybe he wanted me to go balls to the wall and just kiss him right there in the office. I wasn't sure exactly what he wanted, but I could tell that he was desperate for me to give him the right answer. "I'm not going to give you a reason to leave her, Casey."

"That's not..." he started running his fingers through his hair, tousling it until his normally organized blond tresses were chaotically strewn about his head. His gaze matched my eyes again and I couldn't feel my insides anymore. It felt like I'd been completely hollowed out and all I could feel was the ache in my lips to feel his on mine. I'd wanted it so bad for so long and in this moment, we were so close to it. "I don't know what I want."

"I can't help you figure this out," I emphasized again and I had to keep reminding myself to leave it at that. It's too late for us, I thought to myself. We missed our chance six years ago and now it's too late and I can't let my own regret affect his current and very serious relationship. "Why are we even talking about this?"

"I don't know," he admitted, looking a little bit embarrassed, or ashamed. "It's always been so easy to talk to you, Josie. It all just sort of falls out of me."

I understood what he meant, because it all fell out of me too, when I was around him. But this wasn't something that I wanted to hear and it definitely was not something that I was equipped to deal with.

"If she knew that you were avoiding her to hang out with me, she'd be furious."

"Yeah, she would," he agreed with me.

"So, I should go," I mumbled, my voice shaking and my face on fire. If I didn't leave now, I was afraid of what might happen and I knew it would probably be something that we'd both regret.

Casey seemed to understand this because he stood up from his chair, cleared his throat, and said, "I'll walk you out."

And neither one of us said a single word all the way to my car.